Thursday, September 30, 2004

The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster

The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster: "Crystal charges to email reports" Wow, sounds like BOBJ is stepping across the line to increase revenues. While some reporting vendors are trying to stimulate report usage across the organizaion, the recent Crystal licensing strategy will likely stifle adoption.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Sun's fighting chance

Sun's fighting chance: Excellent article on Sun's strategy to attack Red Hat. The next move will be Microsoft's claim that Linux contains some Windows code....I'm guessing that MSFT got a nice deal from Sun on their UNIX license to parallel the indemnification offered by Novell to Linux users. 10 years from now, folks will look back at this as the time when Linux crossed the tipping point to dominate the OS landscape and the incumbents became another chapter for Clayton Christensen.

Friday, September 17, 2004

Scaling Laws in the Functional Content of Genomes: Fundamental Constants of Evolution?

Scaling Laws in the Functional Content of Genomes: Fundamental Constants of Evolution?: "there is in fact a large array of genomic features that show power law distributions." This is a very cool observation about the structure of natural information systems.

DeepChip Homepage

DeepChip Homepage: This is the best survey of real customer opinions on the relative strength of DRC tools in the EDA market that I've seen.

Journal of Rampant Speculation

Journal of Rampant Speculation:
Very cool idea for breaking the "peer-review" bottleneck in science that inhibits discontinuous innovation.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

MJM Engineering Co -- Cryogenic Cooling

MJM Engineering Co -- Cryogenic Cooling: "supercool your chips"
For the extreme gaming system, you can multiply the speed of your computer by attaching a cryrogenic cooler. I talked to one guy who got a 4x increase in chip speed by cooling his pentium to liquid nitrogen temperatures.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Nouse--Nose-Steered Web Surfing System

Yahoo! News - Inventor Develops Nose-Steered Web Surfing System
This would be a killer app for laptops--the current replacements for mice in mobile computing are poor at best. This new technology holds a lot of promise for improving the human interface in mobile computing.

Monday, September 13, 2004

Skype

Skype
Now that Skype offers software for your PDA phone, you can walk into a WiFi hotspot and make a call to anywhere in the world for FREE. Of course, this assumes that your phone is 802.11 enables, which is rare and even more unlikely, the person you want to call on another continent is also a Skype user. Of course, you can still save money by using their discounted service to call internationally to a real land line. However, give this a couple years when most phones will have 802.11 and hotspots are more ubiquituous--what will the cell phone companies do for revenue then?

Friday, September 03, 2004

Spammers embrace email authentication | The Register

Spammers embrace email authentication The Register: "long as spammers comply with the protocol by not spoofing the sender address, their messages will not be stopped by SPF, which "

The only way the spam problem will get solved is when there is a cost associated with sending email. It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem from economic theory. Great Britain experience the same problem with their postal system 200 years ago when advertisers got the idea of using the printing press to do mass mailings--back in those days, the receiver of the mail paid for the postage. It became a big problem and almost killed the postal system until they invented stamps. The invention of stamps allowed senders to be charged for the mail. We need the electronic version of stamps to solve the spam problem. The great part is that normal people would probably never see the cost of the postage, as they send less than they receive--thus the cost of postage could be offset by the revenue from postage for normal people, while the spammer/advertisers end up paying for the system since they send more than they receive.

Thursday, September 02, 2004

Oasis provides respite from GDSII

SEMI's Oasis provides respite from GDSII

The biggest challenge for Moore's Law to continue is the ability to link the chip design process with the manufacturing design. Right now it cannot be effectively done because of the GDSII standard. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it is in any of the EDA vendors interest to adopt an open standard, as it would accelerate competitor for platforms they currently control.

Intel Updates Third-Quarter Business Expectations

Intel Updates Third-Quarter Business Expectations

Intel guided their revenue for the quarter down due to a global slowdown in consumer demand relative to expectations. The important point to note, is that they are still posting strong growth--there's a difference between slowing growth and negative growth. Semiconductor growth follows GDP, and GDP is still growing steadily. While we may be near the "top of the cycle", the market did not over heat, so it's unlikely to crash like it did in 2000. This reduction in volatility should actually make the prospects for the industry more favorable. Of course, the market only looks quarter to quarter and will discount Intel's stock for the short term change despite the long term benefit that will likely result.

First Posting

This is the first post on the Techbuzz weblog. This will be a collection of novel weblinks and observations that I've made doing analysis of the technology market place.